Information Theory and Machine Learning

Research activity report, 1999 - David MacKay

Error-correcting codes

My big paper on low-density parity-check codes
was published in the IEEE transactions on information theory.
An earlier paper with Bob McEliece and J.--F. Cheng
won the Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award in the Field of
Communications Systems.
I have discussed our work with Seagate and Nortel in the hope
of raising industrial funding but without success.

Matthew Davey won the Cambridge University Hamilton Prize
for his essay on his record-breaking low-density parity-check codes.
He expects to complete his thesis on time (3 years).
His thesis topics include the problem of communicating
over a channel with synchronization errors.

Simon Wilson is working for Goldmann-Sachs
and says he will finish his thesis (on
error correcting codes and other inference
problems) before the his 4 years are up.

Empirical Modelling of non-linear relationships

Harry Bhadeshia of Materials Science continues
to use our neural network and Gaussian process
software to model complex metallurgical phenomena.
Siemens and Nippon Steel have both fabricated steels
that were
designed using this software.

The collaboration with Phil Withers of Materials Science,
which hired
Coryn Bailer-Jones for 18 months, has ended,
a new grant application having been turned down.
Two papers written by Coryn has appeared in an IoP journal
and a metallurgy journal.

Latent variable models

James Miskin continues to work on
Blind signal separation, including deblurring of
images. He is using recently developed computational techniques
including ensemble learning and slice sampling (software
supplied by John Skilling).

Human-computer interfaces

Industrial support, in the form of an eye-tracker, has been
obtained (on loan), and David Ward is working on
combining an adaptive language model
with the eye-tracker so as to allow the
user efficiently to convey text or commands to a computer.

Teaching Physics

Sanjoy Mahajan joined our group in August.
His output includes a textbook on order--of--magnitude physics,
a paper containing observations
on Physics teaching
for the Cavendish Teaching Committee, and contributions of
mathematics material to give to physics IA students.

New topics

Quantum computing

I hope to have a student working on quantum error-correction
in October.